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Glad your have not been encountered with any corner case yet. And I'm pretty sure nosh would do the same thing better, without bloat either in scripts or in the init system itself (well, you really want to define "simplification" as replacing several MBs of debuggable scripts with several MBs of spaghetti C code?), and without the "you are not supposed to hold the phone that way" cases.

Nah, I said it wrong. I should have said, "Systemd makes things easier for people who write init scripts for distros."

Not only in distros actually, but also for upstream projects that distribute init configurations.
And usually distro init script writers are far better than most admins (and commercial software vendors script writers) out there that don't even understand how to write shell scripts. I've encountered countless horrors everywhere, and as early as I'm authorized, I reimplement most init scripts, and it's not true only on Linux, but even on AIX, Solaris and HP-UX (back in the day).
I do that since 15+ years. I'm sure most seasoned sysadmins do the same as soon as they encounter one init script bug that breaks their OS.
Someone actually documented there some of the things people that don't understand anything about init scripts, shell scripts or systemd actually do. That's the kind of horrors I see every time.
You don't even want to start thinking about the security implications of such things, especially since those people usually put setuid bits everywhere when their mess does'nt work.
Just like PulseAudio forced sanitizing lots of ALSA drivers, I guess systemd will at least force sanitizing init environments and weed out all these nonsense.
At least I can hope.

Thanks, but I'd be surprise if that happened.

1. You may have noticed that the "story" submitter is Jaromil, so I suspect (extrapolating from experience) he's accompanied by his sock puppet army (do they imitate the NSA with forum flooding and FUD techniques, or does the NSA imitate them?)
2. I've always suspected that the NSA is actively involved in ceasing this opportunity to divide Debian, if not celebrating the number of senior Debian developers who have left due to the number of personal attacks and threats they've recieved from the "anti-systemd" "campaign"

Jaromil does some excellent graphic work - but his musical ability is more autistic than artistic, allowing for a broad spectrum of tastes... and his "software accomplishments" is less than truthful (his hasciicam program lacks truthful attributions to it's true basis, and his Dyneobolic distro is just one of very many "respins". Not a patch on Knoppix - which is the work of one person , or a shadow of Mint and other Debian derivatives. There have been many Debian fork attempts...

Some vaguely related trivia regarding your pseudonym. Unix was a joke name chosen by the developers of Multix - the operating system that was intended to "do everything", when their funding was cut. Eunuchs/Unix was the result. Linux was the name given to Linux Torvalds to create a non-Unix compatible kernel.

apt-get install sysvinit-core

You can replace the complex binary and they'll still work. You can even use an offline generator to translate unit-files into shell scripts, nosh ( http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j... ) does just that.

These? http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rob_withey/images/large/cf_drive.jpg

It's like exploring the world map in Dragon Quest...lots of landmarks and buildings have been 8-bittified and there are plenty more to discover. They've also cleverly hidden Dragon Quest enemies around the world
People are trying to look for the places. Found some sites with screenshots:

Some of the major world sites in 8-bit sprite format: http://www.bulsuk.com/2012/04/google-maps-8-bit-tour-of-world.html
The enemy characters, including the dragon King in the middle of the world, literally: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/keir.clarke/web/dragon.htm
And the guys at Reedit busy exploring. Unfortunately not all the links point to the right place: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/rmfr1/browse_google_maps_in_8bit/c470937

Does anyone know how many monuments are actually included in the map?

The melting point of a surface mount IC is a lot less than that of a spinning platter.

Considering that all you need to melt a hard disk platter is a flower pot, a haird rier, and some charcoal that shouldn't be any problem.

There's those specialist industrial shredders designed just for disk drives that reduce them to a small heap of granules.

A cheaper alternative would be a flowerpot and some charcoal. Or they could send them to a commercial aluminium recycler to make it look more profesional.

The Bios doesn't know anything about partitioning. It only knows it needs to read sector 0 of a disk into memory at 0x7c00 and jump to it. If the disk is MBR partitioned that's the MBR and the code there knows how to scan the partition table, and load the boot sector of the partition table using INT 13h. If it's not partitioned sector 0 is the boot sector of the partition table already and will use INT 13h to load the OS boot loader.

GPT is different because sector 0 contains a "Protective MBR" that just reserves the whole disk. That doesn't contain any code - EFI Bioses need to read boot code from a special FAT formatted partition (Macs apparently use HFS+ instead). EFI Bioses offer a much more complicated API than the Bios, which is good in some ways (flexibility) and bad in others (more chance of bugs).

But non partitioned disks have always been supported. In fact floppy disks are always non partitioned.

Actually it's a shame that sector 0 of an GPT disk doesn't contain code to load a boot manager that understands GPT to allow booting from a GPT disk with an old fashioned Bios. Or that some way for old style Bioses to boot from disks with a partition table with 64 bit LBAs in wasn't developed - MBR partitioning only has space for 32 bit LBAs. Which means no support for disks bigger than 2TB.

War was beginning...

(Obligatory humor: Somebody set up us the BIND).

In Texas, Grande's lowest speed service is advertised as 384k/128k, yet speed tests and docsdiag shows that it's really 450k/196k:

QoS max downstream bandwidth = 450000 bps
QoS max upstream bandwidth = 196000 bps

To get in, first you open mspaint and click on the A button. The open an Excel spreadsheet and leave the cursor on the cell B23. Then you move the mouse over the first letter o (for Obama) in the word Glorious. And click simultaneously control,PgUp,alt,scroll lock and del keys. That will open a dialog very similar to shutdown/reboot dialog. Select shutdown, but it is really a secret passage way. Then the site fully and give you full access to all the materials.

Sometimes the site will pretend to shut the machine off to fool the FBI and CIA. You may have to try three of four times before you could get in.

These laws make it illegal to have or to share information intended to be useful to terrorists

Check

ban glorifying terrorism

Check

or urging people to commit terrorist acts.

and check.

PNG Transparencies in IE5.5 and 6? DONE!

I found this a LONG time ago. I did not write it, but the link to the authors who did, sits in the comments at the top.

// Correctly handle PNG transparency in Win IE 5.5 or higher. // http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola. Updated 02-March-2004

function correctPNG()
      {
      for(var i=0; i"
                                  img.outerHTML = strNewHTML
                                  i = i-1
                          }
            }
      }
window.attachEvent("onload", correctPNG);

function fixPNG(myImage) // correctly handle PNG transparency in Win IE 5.5 or higher.
      {
        if (window.ie55up)
                  {
                  var imgID = (myImage.id) ? "id='" + myImage.id + "' " : ""
                  var imgClass = (myImage.className) ? "class='" + myImage.className + "' " : ""
                  var imgTitle = (myImage.title) ? "title='" + myImage.title + "' " : "title='" + myImage.alt + "' "
                  var imgStyle = "display:inline-block;" + myImage.style.cssText
                  var strNewHTML = ""
                  myImage.outerHTML = strNewHTML
                  }
      }

It's the same UFO...

And it's not stationary at all, since the radar tracked it the trajectory/speed of this object is known and last time I checked balloons don't travel 13 miles in 6 seconds. But I'll expect something like "I don't trust what's written on the web".

And no, foo fighters follow the tail. They don't pull shit like that

I'm not sure if this is a joke.

The very force that makes the windmill spin is also pushing the boat backwards. If the boat has 0 wind resistance and the windmill is 100% efficient, the boat will remain stationary. This arrangement will never result in a positive net force.

If the boat is moving at an angle to the wind, then yes; the windmill will make the boat move faster, but no more than a simple sail would.

reminds me of Escher

For more info, read the 4-part series on secret bases:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alan-turnbull/secret.htm

And yes, PNG's are smaller but I've found that IE6 can do weird things to them.

256 color PNGs work correctly in IE6. No need to do anything special.

And don't forget you can't easily do transparent PNG's until IE6 is finally flushed out of our system

Put pngfix.js in an IE conditional tag if it bothers you. I refuse to stop the progress train because of Microsoft's ill-gotten monopoly.

If they were using ASP.NET MVC you wouldn't have even known the thing was running ASP.NET.

I confess, I haven't used ASP.NET 3.5/MVC yet. It would have been handy back when I inherited an ASP.NET project. Unfortunately, after my poor experiences with ASP.NET's scalability (or lack thereof), I'm not really inclined to develop another site in ASP.

As a former President once mumbled, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... you ain't gonna fool me again." :-P

Lord knows, these people may have been T-Shirt Ninjas and could have used such a dangerous terrorist tool so as to conceal their identity.

Boot stomping on the face of freedom, forever....

Ouch, nasty. Having dealt with the UK frontline support a couple of times (and having found them less than clueful), I feel your pain.

Here is the link to the relevant page of Robin D H Walker's website, where may be found the post-install process, including the serial number.

If you have a removable drive / recovery cd that you take for antivirus / diagnostic tools, it's worth dropping the url link to the post-installation site in a directory so it remains with you.

Additional disclaimer - I am neither Robin Walker nor affiliated with NTL/Virgin - I just happen to live in a Virgin cabled area and have set up a number of machines on behalf of end-users.

F_T

Or the ones who ride on the white line separating the lane from the shoulder, despite having a full, clear shoulder to bike in.

I'm all about sharing the road, but cyclists need to learn that sharing means they share too, not that they get whatever the hell they want.

Sometimes the "bike lane" isn't big enough for the cyclist. There are pictures on the net of people holding a bike upside-down over a "bike lane", with the handlebars extending over the lines. In these cases, it's safer to cycle down the line, so drivers are aware that the bike is outside the lane (otherwise, they might get the impression that the cyclist is in the lane, so they can be ignored).

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pete.meg/wcc/facility-of-the-month/August2005.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pete.meg/wcc/facility-of-the-month/June2005.htm

Or the ones who ride on the white line separating the lane from the shoulder, despite having a full, clear shoulder to bike in.

I'm all about sharing the road, but cyclists need to learn that sharing means they share too, not that they get whatever the hell they want.

Sometimes the "bike lane" isn't big enough for the cyclist. There are pictures on the net of people holding a bike upside-down over a "bike lane", with the handlebars extending over the lines. In these cases, it's safer to cycle down the line, so drivers are aware that the bike is outside the lane (otherwise, they might get the impression that the cyclist is in the lane, so they can be ignored).

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pete.meg/wcc/facility-of-the-month/August2005.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pete.meg/wcc/facility-of-the-month/June2005.htm

15 Miles really isn't a significant cycling distance. I used to cycle this route (genericised for relative anonymity) daily to work, it used to take roughly 30 minutes depending how I felt, I was also in good company. (I now live literally next door to work, I do still cycle to college in the evenings, via this route)

To be fair London is mostly as flat as a pancake, particularly the North East (The boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets quite literally don't have a hill between them), but it's also definitely not a cycling city, something you're very aware of while trying to keep up an adequate speed 2 lanes from the kerb to cross a flyover. I have, however, come to enjoy Vehicular Cycling and happily use major junctions without incident. Segregated cycle facilities are usually rubbish anyway, sometimes absurdly so..

My point is one about attitude. The first few days you do the ride it will seem hard, no doubt. You may have to get up early, you might need a shower (or at least some wipes and a change of clothes) when you get in. It will, however, become normal very quickly. Cycling produces endorphins that will keep you happy all day, you'll lose weight and look and feel better, as you become fitter you'll sweat less and arrive at work feeling awake and happy, you'll wonder why everybody else drives to work, wondering why they won't even try it. You'll also save money on fuel and maintenance.

It sounds to me like you're scared of both the roads and the exercise. Both become normal, daily things that hold no fear very quickly. I'd be interested to see a map of your proposed route to see how bad it could possibly be. If you're 3.5 stone overweight it sounds like the time to do something about it is right now, take the plunge.

MailRail, in London, came closest to the proposed system. Little automated electric trains carried mail since 1928. It was shut down in 2003. (It's still intact, though; it might be restarted some day.)

MailRail gives a sense of the constraints of a realistic system. The tunnels are 9 feet in diameter and double-tracked, so it's possible to get repair crews and equipment into the tunnels without much trouble. For small-tube systems, breakdowns are tough to deal with. MailRail was a railroad in miniature, with stations, sidings, switches, repair shops, and work trains. Even rails wear out and have to be reground or replaced, so MailRail had the gear to do "maintenance of way" work. All those things are needed, and many of them are labor intensive.

The operating cost on MailRail was quite high, even though all the capital costs had long since been paid for. Cost was 3x to 5x the cost of using trucks. But the real problem was that it didn't go to the right places; over the decades, post offices had been moved to locations off the MailRail line, and only three of the nine stations were still in use.

The Chicago tunnel system had a different problem. It was designed when long-haul freight was by rail and local delivery was horse-powered. Bear in mind that trains were routinely hauling heavy loads by 1850, but trucks didn't appear until the 1920s and didn't work well until the 1930s. (1920s trucks had power comparable to that of a small car today.) So for a seventy-year period, local delivery was badly matched to long-haul transport. Early attempts to deal with this problem involved breeding very large horses. This was the period of pneumatic tubes, underground freight rail systems, and similar attempts to fix the local delivery problem. Once truck engines and drivetrains become powerful enough to do the job, those local delivery systems were no longer needed.

Actually, IE 5.5 and 6 do have an exposed method for loading PNGs with an alpha channel - but for some inexplicable reason they didn't use that method when loading a normal image. Someone wrote a javascript filethat modifies the DOM to replace IMG tags pointing to PNGs with IE's proprietary method at load time.

Works like a charm, and allowed me migrate entirely off of GIF years ago.

I love my TeraStation. It's running linux, and there are a few sites out there that have instructions and downloads that do everything from adding basic functionality to tweaking existing functionality to building your own development toolchain and letting you do whatever you choose. Check out Dave Walker's great work with the TeraStation and other Buffalo Products, and NAS Central a wiki site dedicated to the Buffalo NAS family.

You know more about Lennon than I.

When I was living in England I read all the books in the library about the Beatles. There were many that were not published in the U.S, and not generally available in the United States. But... That was a long time ago, and I developed the impression that there were no really good biographies available then.

Just now, thanks to Google, I've learned more.

I didn't like the Plastic Ono Band album, but don't remember much about it.

I certainly agree about Imagine. It's not clear when he wrote the song, apparently.

I got the impression that Lennon and McCartney had a big effect on each other's song writing. Without Lennon's influence, McCartney's lyrics became syrupy. I got the impression that each of them would say to the other, "You're not really going to say that?" They apparently acted as each other's editor. Apparently McCartney helped limit Lennon's negativity and cynicism.

In my opinion, both Cynthia and Yoko Ono were good for John. It wasn't his involvement with them that was the problem. It was what he did with them. He shouldn't have had a child with Cynthia or with Yoko. In the language of U.S. women, Yoko "got her hooks into him". She manipulated his weaknesses. That was easy for many people to see, including other members of the Beatles.

This web page is interesting: John Lennon Primal therapy. That web page contains an accurate description of Primal therapy. However, the description may be useful only to people who have already done Primal Therapy. It's not very useful to someone who is only reading about it.

On that web page, Arthur Janov says, "Then he or Yoko called me.." I think Janov knows who called him. I'm guessing it was Yoko.

Janov says, "He said 'Could you send a therapist to Mexico with me?' I said 'We can't do that, John.' " In my opinion, something is very wrong there. The story must be more complicated than that.

Janov says, "... we've since .. done a tremendous amount of science and research, and It holds up." I have seen no evidence that Janov understood why Primal Therapy works, or that he had good theories, or even that he understood the importance of theories. I'm guessing that he made that statement to be fashionable.

I haven't thought about it for a long time, but I've seen no evidence that Janov went through Primal Therapy himself, even though he seems to have had considerable issues of his own. Janov discovered Primal Therapy, described things he saw very well, but was not the sort of careful thinker who would be able to carry his understanding to the next level. I've seen no evidence that the therapists at the Primal Institute have done Primal Therapy themselves. Last time I checked, they seemed to be running the Institute as a business, like a small computer manufacturer runs a business, for example.

Hi, I don't think the cable modem should make a huge difference as the cable companies push a config (profile ?) to each modem setting the max upstream / downstream limits. When on cable I was never fortunate enough to be getting higher up/down speeds than paid for... but when I was being capped below my service plan I used this great tool: DocsisDiag to grab the config settings currently on the modem. Good info to have when arguing with tech support. Not sure how the profile would look for Comcast with speedboost... but it'd be interesting to that or the config from your modem with 25-28mbps. -J

On that basis, I seem to have written ZX Spectrum emulation for QEMU. Oops! :-)

BTW, there's a list of emulators in the comp.sys.sinclair FAQ.

Carrier Command. Now that was an underrated gem. Not certain if it was an Amiga game first, though. There was certainly a (not as good looking) PC version, and I played both at various times.

Sad to say, I seem to recall some bugs in the Amiga version that weren't in the PC version. Your inventory would get screwed, and you'd have to restart your game to get it working right again. And on the PC you could send a set of walruses with a set of mantas way off on expeditions to capture other islands, as long as one of the mantas had a long-range communications pod, and one or two of the walruses had extra fuel... and you set all the fighters to go as slow as possible...

It was a pretty effective little strategy, almost too much so. But it seemed obvious the designers had intended to make it possible. Unfortunately I noticed on the Amiga a weird glitch would usually cause this not to work somehow.

By the way, there's a very long running fan project to remake the game on modern hardware, in OpenGL (here)... still kicking, from the looks of it. :)

There's also a modern remake in the early production phases at a small developer (here).

The only Amiga game that interested me back in the 90's that wasn't on the PC or SNES/Genesis is Alien Breed.
There is a freeware remake available for Windows:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/xavnet/alienbreed/

You got lucky: the watermark sounds exactly like someone singing the words "bring your daughter to the slaughter", so you're covered.

Unfortunately, those lyrics will be added to every new commercial song that this system protects. Kenny G initially had some concerns, but he's on board with the plan now.

Well as regards PNG it's still broken in the majority browser case thanks to Microsoft's fine support of open standards. With you on the rest though ;)

I'm an ENFP, so your telling me my genitals are wrong, that in fact my personality defines my gender, That in fact im a party Girl!

N.B. Not to be confused with http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gary.hart/lyricsa/ima ges/aqua.jpgBarbie Girl

heh, easy best free game is Uniball. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jamie.mac1/uniball/ Play free online and get your a$$ kicked

I really doubt the legality of this one but Hiren's BootCD must be one of the most complete solutions. SVP also sells real cheap microSD-adapters which can probably make a nice small drive, but microSD-cards are much more expensive than miniSD and SD so maybe it's a bad idea.

Hirens Boot CD. 1337. Pirated. Good. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd.h tml

For me, there's one disk. It's a beast. It's also of questionable legality. That being said, when shit hits the fan i don't mind if 'legal' and i are on opposite sides of the fence at zero hour. Nobody cares when their servers aren't working. Note, this isn't a link, just a good description (so you can find it yourself... hint: newsgroups)
Hiren's Boot CD

It was better than mixing assembly and BASIC. BASIC served as an über-macro assembler meaning that while other people were struggling to write hacky loaders for their machine code, we were coding our own compilers. I wrote an adventure game compiler (which in retrospect I now realise was similar to a baby version of Inform). It would have been a lot harder without BBC Basic.

I remember having real speed issues on cable modems as I approached the upload speed limit. I believe this may be why.

Although it may not affect UDP; I dunno.

I'm not sure if it was posted yesterday or not, but there is a quick and easy javascript fix for transparent PNGs in IE.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/

I know it isn't perfect, and is a hack, but it is useful for using PNG graphics on sites displated in IE.

because instead of his incredable import art work he would probably be in jail just where the Nazi's wanted him to be. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/davepalmer/cutandpast e/heartfield_big5.html Do we know this teacher was not a total ass? We do know that the police and a doctor say he was of no threat. Well maybe he will start his run from the opressive authority that heartfeld (change his name to heartfield to be less jewish) Maybe these parents keep a very strong grasp on there son and new exactly what he was doing. Do you know other wise? I would much rather see experssions of anger then no expression that later just manifest and actualy violence. So unless you know what the parents knew for fact. The LAW and DOCTORS found him to be NO THREAT.

There is a fix for the broken PNG support. There are several scripts out there such as "IE7" and pngfix.js. I like the pngfix.js one as it's very small and only fixes png support.

I and many many MANY webdesigners would kill, no.. go on a murder rampage for an image format that has alpha transparency to show a background through.

AA! Don't kill me!

I think that Lucas's theorem is the most famous argument for this. Maybe its the only one. This isn't my specialty, and I don't really know what I'm talking about here. Here is a web page that gives a summary of the argument, and claims to refutes it, so the person who wrote the page thinks he knows what he is talking about. His page references a few published works, so maybe he even does.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/g.mccaughan/g/remarks /lucas.html

This book? http://homepage.ntlworld.com/john.seymour1/ukbookg Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater

I'd been playing games in the home since 1980 when I got my Philips Videopac G7000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_G7000 but nothing grabbed me as much as Final Fantasy VII http://www.ffonline.com/ff7/ did. Before I had spent a few days on a game before getting bored, I played FF7 for over 7 months before I finished it.

Just waiting for the movie to come out on DVD - http://www.square-enix.co.jp/dvd/ff7ac/

By the way, does anyone remember Super Robot on OpenVMS? I spent hours at lunchtime at this game at work, not graphically great by any means but great fun when all you have is a VT220 :) - There's a Windows version at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.kelly4/robot.ht m

Jonathan

http://www.justgofaster.com/

I think the Walkman was a refinement of an existing system and although parts of the technology needed to make that refinement could be subject to patents I'm not sure the general idea of a portable music player should be patentable nor should the removal of loudspeaker and power supply be classed as "invention".